The more she talked, the more it became apparent that like her mother she ran the house, ran her husband, ran the show. What she thought of as female power was really being overbearing and opinionated, controlling, and argumentative—enforcing one’s will in a driven way.
Running the show is hardly female authority. To stand firm with power and dignity has little to do with ordering people around, constantly uncorking a lot of strong opinions and judgments, controlling things, or spouting off when someone pushes your button.
Eventually the woman recognized that like the rest of us she and her mother had their own wounded feminine life inside, that they, too, had been severed from their feminine souls and because of that had learned to mimic the ways of patriarchy. What they mistook for female strength and authority was recycled patriarchal power.
We find genuine female authority within when we become the “author” of our own identity. By taking the journey to the feminine soul, we “authorize” ourselves.
Ann Ulanov, professor at Union Theological Seminary, writes that a woman who has found her authority “is securely and consciously anchored in her own feminine being.”10 As a matter of course, this woman begins to experience the internal solidity I was beginning to notice, the change in substance. She comes to the solid center of herself and finds her own ground to stand on. And she stands there with her own authority.
Rather than needing to control and enforce things, she stands, steady and dignified, in this authority, with a knowing that is barnacled to her insides, that gives her the gumption and the enterprise to act in behalf of her vision and her soul. It’s what allows her to do intrepid things—sometimes being gentle, sometimes fierce, sometimes waiting, sometimes leaping. But always knowing who she is.
The One-in-Herself Woman
As summer came, I read physician Esther Harding’s book on feminine psychology, coming upon a train of thought that at first baffled then intrigued me. Harding spoke about a woman who may be married and have children or may have much sexual experience but is a virgin. Naturally, I wondered how a woman manages a thing like that.
Harding points out that in ancient times the word virgin had a different meaning than it does now. It didn’t mean being chaste or physically untouched. Rather, being a virgin meant belonging to oneself.
Being a virgin, she says, refers to “a quality, a subjective state, a psychological attitude, not to a physiological or external fact.” For a woman it means she is uncaptured or, as Harding puts it, she is “one-in-herself.”11
In that context, a married woman, a mother, or any sexually experienced woman can be a virgin. It means that while she may relate fully to her partner, she does not give herself away to him or to patriarchy. She gives herself to her own soul. She is her own mistress, her own authority, her own woman.
Once when I tried to explain this to someone, she thought I meant that in being a virgin we would have no need for anyone else. But that wasn’t it at all. By now I knew how intricately connected I was. If anything, as I belonged more and more to myself, I was able to relate more deeply and truly to those in my life. The relationships became something I chose, not something I felt dependent on or trapped in.
Being one-in-myself wasn’t an aloof containment but a spiritual and psychological autonomy. It meant being whole and complete in myself and relating to others out of that soul-centeredness.
The journey to Crete, which I’ve referred to many times, took place the following fall. Before departing, I read about an ancient rite performed by the prepatriarchal Goddess Hera. The myth said every year she would return for a ritual bath in the Kanathos spring in Greece to renew her virginity, or her quality of belonging to herself.12
While in Crete, our leader, a scholar in women’s spirituality and Goddesses of the ancient Mediterranean, mentioned that ancient women took part in these same baths, immersing themselves three times in the sea, in order to reclaim their virginity.
So one free afternoon in the village of Mochlos, I swam out into the sea with my friend Terry, the same Terry who’d led me to the buffalo in Colorado. A few hundred yards out in the water was a tiny, deserted island that contained nothing but scruffy brush and some ancient Greek ruins. We planned to spend the afternoon there.
Behind us in the water we pulled a child’s inflated, plastic boat, which we’d purchased in the village. It was loaded with supplies Terry had brought from home to make masks—rolls of plaster of paris, scissors, Vaseline to protect our faces from the plaster, towels, bottles of water. It had been her idea to make a mask here, to capture an image of ourselves to take back home and paint.
As we dragged our little boat up onto the shore, I couldn’t help but think of Naxos, the island where Ariadne had been deserted by Theseus. The thought stayed with me as Terry and I went exploring and finally came to part of a ruin at the water’s edge. It was a low rock wall with some kind of basin cut into the stone, maybe part of an ancient house or temple. We spread out our supplies, filled the ageless basin with seawater, and cut the plaster into strips.
Then we picked our way barefooted over the stones, down to the sea. We waded our waist high and immersed ourselves three times. I remember most the shock of coldness as I went under, the rhythmic, almost mesmerizing immersion down and under, down and under, the gauzy light sifting under the water, and then the way the sun spattered on the surface when I came sputtering up the third time. I remember the rinsed look of everything, the determination in my chest, the power in my belly.
After drying off, I spread a towel on the ground inside the ruin and lay down. Terry spread the plaster of paris strips over my face, covering everything but my eyes and nostrils. “You have to be perfectly still,” she said, “until it dries.”
Lying silent in the Greek sun, the plaster tightened and seemed to dissolve into my skin, becoming part of me. Earlier when we’d talked about which aspect of ourselves we wanted the mask to symbolize, I’d thought of Ariadne. Now I replayed her story again—how after Ariadne had been abandoned on Naxos, she turned inward, finding her own resources. On Naxos she’d become one-in-herself.
Just a few days earlier, the tour bus driver had pointed to the craggy brown island of Naxos sitting out in the Aegean. Lying now on the Mochlos island, drowsy with sun and meditation and myth, I could easily imagine it as Naxos, the space of becoming One-in-Herself.
Finally Terry lifted away the dried mask and put it into my hands. Gazing at my cheeks, chin, forehead, nose, lips, I remembered this face going into the sea three times. The mask represented the face of the woman who came up out of the water. It registered in me as the image of an empowered self. It made me think of the female authority that comes when we start to belong to ourselves, to our own souls.
Back home I painted the mask green. On it I glued rocks, feathers, and shells from Crete, a brass labyrinth, and a coil of the string that my friend Betty and I had followed that night we moved through the woods, learning how to follow our thread.
Today the mask of the One-in-Herself Woman sits on a stand in my study. When I look at her, I feel the solid knowing in my belly. I remember who I am and who I hope to be. I smile at her a lot.
Iron-Jawed Angels
I flipped the channel to PBS one night and landed in the middle of a program about the suffragettes. I tuned in just in time to see policemen taking women away from the front of the White House where they had stood holding signs that asked, “How long must women wait for liberty?” The women were hauled away to jail, but then another handful of women came with the same determined look in their faces and held up the same signs.
They were taunted by passing men but also by other women, a thing that seemed incredulous on first glance. I mean, how could these other women believe they should not have the right to vote? Unless—and now suddenly I wasn’t thinking only about women in 1920—they’d become so conditioned to subordinate experience and so used to being denied their rights that they’d normalized it.
I pondered wha
t caused one group to support the system that subordinated and wounded them and the other group to believe their rights as women were worth fighting for. Looking at those two disparate groups of women, the things I’d learned during my awakening had never seemed more true—that women internalize the feminine wound or feminine inferiority so deeply, there’s little or no female authority and esteem to fall back on. So they seek it by adopting and pleasing patriarchal standards. And my heart went out to these women, too, despite their blindness, because once upon a time, I’d been there.
I watched as the suffragettes stood, unflinching, through all the derision. The police came again and took the second group of sign holders away.
Inevitably, the authorities decided the women with their signs were getting out of hand, so they stepped up their intimidation, interrogating them in jail. The women responded by going on hunger strikes. The authorities insisted they eat. The women refused. The authorities brought in gastric tubes and force-fed them. Still the women refused to open their mouths to eat. They were, as one sympathetic bystander called them, “the iron-jawed angels.”
In the end the women couldn’t be broken, so they were released. They went back to their signs and their exhausting work of standing firm with power and dignity. And in the end they won us our right to vote.
Having never thought much about these women until I saw that program, I was unprepared for the rush of feeling I had for them, the love, gratitude, and awe for these ordinary women who took on husbands, fathers, government, church, and the entire weight of cultural tradition for the sake of justice. I sat on the sofa awhile after the program ended and asked myself about fifty times whether I could have done something like that.
The image of the iron-jawed angel became another representation of the feminine power I hoped to nurture: the self inside who, carrying her own sense of authority and esteem, can exhibit an uncommon resilience and inner toughness, especially when opposition comes.
Women who struggle for justice in religious structures, who dare to save the Divine from exclusive masculinity, who seek truth instead of defending dogma need every bit as much of the brawny-hearted strength those iron-jawed angels had. For opposition nearly always comes. I had my moments of it, some large, some small. But remember: At the time it’s happening, all opposition feels large, and even when it’s quite small, you still have to reach inside for the same unwavering grit.
I’m thinking of a phone conversation with a male priest friend who was uncomfortable with my transformation. He said, “Sue, as a priest I must tell you, by not being faithful to the church as you once were, you’re setting the wrong example for your children. They’ll be the ones to suffer.” Translation: I am a spiritual authority. I, therefore, know what’s best for you. What’s best is for you to get back in line. And I will try to get you there, if necessary by raising the specter of bad motherhood—the ultimate leverage.
When someone tries to put you back into a box from which you’ve already escaped, you might recall a line from the Indian poet Mirabai. She said, “I have felt the swaying of the elephant’s shoulders and now you want me to climb on a jackass? Try to be serious!”13
Still, hearing opposition as I did from my priest friend can be a mild shock, especially in the beginning. You may have to lay the phone down for a few seconds and breathe. When you finally comprehend what is happening, you may feel the iron-jawed angel wake up inside. You may hear yourself tell the person on the other end of the line that he shouldn’t worry, you’re your own authority now.
Sometimes the more public the opposition, the larger it may seem. Once when I spoke before a large audience on the feminine spiritual journey, a woman in the back stood up during the question session, raised her Bible, and cried out, “What you’re saying is an abomination!” After having her say (and what a say it was!), she marched out, inviting others to follow. Fortunately, only one other woman went, but it was high drama, moments I watched in still-frame, half-believing. Meanwhile the full realization about the opposition that’s out there came crashing down like a piece of the sky.
What I did was to stand there and remember every iron-jawed angel I could think of.
One I often recall is the old grandmother in the movie Strictly Ballroom. Her granddaughter, along with a partner, wants to dance a daring new dance that breaks with convention. They face a barrage of public opposition because of it, so much that they are about to back off. At this moment, the old grandmother steps forth, sets her iron jaw, looks into her granddaughter’s eyes, and says, “A life lived in fear is a life half lived.”
I try to take that old woman with me at all times.
In the end, refusing the fear is what gets us through oppositional experiences. Refusing to half-live our lives means going out there and daring our dance.
Atop the Acropolis in Greece is a building known as the Erechtheum. The roof on its south porch is supported by the caryatids, six columns sculpted in the shape of women. While I was in Greece, the sight of the caryatids holding up that large ancient roof was the most inspiring thing on the Acropolis, even more than the Parthenon. The caryatids formed the stirring image of strong women bearing up, and I stood there thinking of all the women I knew who had borne up under enormous weight and opposition and in doing so made a space, a shelter, something of beauty for the rest of us.
A friend stood nearby, also gazing at them, and her thoughts must have paralleled mine, because she said, “Now there are some strong-necked women.”
I liked her description. Strong-necked women. Just another way of saying iron-jawed women. Either way, it was the group I wanted to belong to.
EMBODYING SACRED FEMININE EXPERIENCE
Female empowerment is not only about emerging to voice our souls and finding a new inner authority as women. It is also about something far more simple—embodying our Sacred Feminine experience. This means bringing it home, so to speak, to our work, play, and relationships. The more we enact our feminine consciousness in our ordinary lives—living out the truth in our souls, the convictions in our hearts, and the wisdom in our bodies—the more empowered we become and the more capable we are of affecting the world immediately around us.
Becoming the Circle of Trees
In Crete we visited a mountaintop shrine called Kato Symi, where thousands of years ago the Great Mother had been worshiped. An ancient tree grows there. The inside of its massive trunk has been hollowed out, and one side of it has worn completely away, leaving a crescent-shaped wall of bark that rises into the sky. The space inside the tree is so large, all fifteen of us women were able to gather inside it.
Standing inside the tree, surrounded by tree trunk and the smell of gnarled bark, I suddenly realized that I was not in a circle of trees but inside the circle of a single tree. Perhaps it was the deepest circle yet. From this unique perspective I had the feeling of being taken into the tree, of being part of the tree, part of the trunk and roots and branches.
The moment affirmed to me all over again that having Sacred Feminine experience wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough to have a sacred place, to go to a circle of trees in the woods. I needed to become the circle of trees, to be the sacred place wherever I went, to dwell so deeply inside my experience and have it dwell so deeply inside of me that there was no separation between us.
Embodiment means we no longer say, I had this experience; we say, I am this experience.
You have seen women like this, women who carry their feminine consciousness, their spiritual wisdom, their knowing, so fully and naturally that it is written all over them. I’ve known powerful women like this, and I find myself wanting to be in their presence and drink deeply. They are mentors, wise women, women whose transfiguration has settled deep inside them. Walt Whitman in his preface to Leaves of Grass seems to be describing the very quality these women embody: “Reexamine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest
fluency, not only in words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body.”14
In Margaret Atwood’s novel Surfacing, one of the characters says, “I lean against a tree. I am a tree, leaning.”15 When I read that I felt it was describing the shift to embodiment. For a long time we lean against the trees in the circle and they hold us up. But there comes a time when we realize that we must become the tree in the circle, able to hold the leaning of others.
A Spirituality of Naturalness
One particular way we can embody Sacred Feminine experience in our daily lives is to embrace a spirituality of naturalness. Like springwater, this spirituality arises out of our nature, our feminine nature. It’s native to us, not artificial or manufactured or piped in from some other place. Very simply, this spirituality is true to who we are as women; it comes from within us and flows out.
The spirituality we’ve inherited from patriarchy is laced with a denial of the natural. Patriarchal spirituality becomes a flight from earth, flesh, temporality, and the present. But Sacred Feminine consciousness seizes us by the shoulders, looks in our eyes, and tells us with passion and simplicity: If you don’t get anything else, get this. This is your life, right now, on this changing earth, in this impermanent body, among these excruciatingly ordinary things. This is it. You will not find it anywhere else.
A natural (and feminine) spirituality tends to incorporate three very organic, basic, but overlooked things into our sacred experience: the earthly, the now, and the ordinary.
THE EARTHLY I live only a few hours from the ocean, and I try to get there as often as possible. The last time I was there, on a September morning, I took my scarf, a wild purple thing with gold fringe that I’d bought in a used clothing store in New Mexico, and I went down to the shore with my flashlight just before the sun came up, when no one was around, not even the crabbers. I took my scarf and danced in my bare feet in the breaking light, on and on along the waves that had by then all turned to harps. The wind whipped my scarf, whipped through me. I was living out my freedom. I was paying my respects to Herself, rejuvenating my connection, pulling myself like a thread through the shoreline. On that morning I felt that I was one of the ten thousand broken shells tumbling in the surf or one of the pelicans, with her belly skimming the ocean, open-billed, gulping in the mystery firsthand. I told myself: This . . . this is my spirituality.